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Happy Family Literacy Day!
Jan. 27th, 2020 03:25 pmToday, January 27, is Family Literacy Day in Canada. One way I celebrated the day was by reading a book to my younger granddaughter while my daughter kept an orthodontic appointment. The book had all the usual ingredients you can expect in a fairy tale - good guys (the little boy whose tooth came out, his family, the tooth fairies), bad guys (Mr. McCavity - not to be confused with the T.S. Eliot cat - and Dee Kay) and a moral message, not just about the virtues of dental hygiene but also about two parrots who just wanted to be free instead of being kept in cages and brought to market to be sold. What's not to like? Afterwards we all had lunch together at The Table and no parrots were harmed in the preparation of the meal.
I'd also like to pay tribute here to the author of the book I just finished reading yesterday. The author in question is Suzette Hagen Elgin (nee Patricia Anne Wilkins), who died exactly five years ago today, at the age of 78. She was a prolific author, linguist and feminist who, among her many accomplishments, constructed a feminist language (LAadan), which features in her science fiction trilogy (again, what's not to like?)
The book I just finished, The Language Imperative, is one of her numerous non-fiction works, very well researched but very accessible too. Like me, she subscribes to the Sapir-Whorf or Language Relativity Hypothesis, which essentially says that language shapes our thoughts and our perspective on the world, the way we organize our reality. It has the potential to constrain or enlarge our views, but it certainly makes a difference.
I've read the first volume of her trilogy, Native Tongue, and hope soon to press on with the other two volumes (Judas Rose and Earthsong). But first I want to tackle Margaret Atwood's latest book, the Testaments. Native Tongue has in fact been compared - mostly favourably - with The Handmaid's Tale. I'm eager to decide what I think about that!
I'd also like to pay tribute here to the author of the book I just finished reading yesterday. The author in question is Suzette Hagen Elgin (nee Patricia Anne Wilkins), who died exactly five years ago today, at the age of 78. She was a prolific author, linguist and feminist who, among her many accomplishments, constructed a feminist language (LAadan), which features in her science fiction trilogy (again, what's not to like?)
The book I just finished, The Language Imperative, is one of her numerous non-fiction works, very well researched but very accessible too. Like me, she subscribes to the Sapir-Whorf or Language Relativity Hypothesis, which essentially says that language shapes our thoughts and our perspective on the world, the way we organize our reality. It has the potential to constrain or enlarge our views, but it certainly makes a difference.
I've read the first volume of her trilogy, Native Tongue, and hope soon to press on with the other two volumes (Judas Rose and Earthsong). But first I want to tackle Margaret Atwood's latest book, the Testaments. Native Tongue has in fact been compared - mostly favourably - with The Handmaid's Tale. I'm eager to decide what I think about that!
